BOOM: World's Awesomest* Astrophysicist Destroys December 21 Prophecy In A Snap

[D Gary Grady]

24. It was a real but minor problem that simply got fixed

I've done a lot of software development and actually created some Y2K problems myself, so I can say on the basis of actual knowledge (and, were I not shameless, a little shame) that the year 2000 problem was genuine and potentially serious. But once it was widely recognized, it simply got fixed. That's the lesson to take from this: If we recognize a problem in time and do something about it, we can make the problem go away. The wrong lesson (and I don't mean to pick on you about this) is to assume that since the problem was solved there was never a problem to begin with.

The reason this is more than a bit of historical trivia is that global warming deniers sometimes point to the Y2K problem as an example of a crisis that never materialized and suggest that we can therefore assume that all crises are mere hype. That's ridiculous in itself, but it's doubly bad in the case of Y2K because it shows that if we recognize and act on a danger it time we can avert it. It's too late to prevent all the problems of global warming (some are already here), but we can at least mitigate them.